Do You Tell Your Buyers What to Do?

I’m writing a chapter for my book on this very topic at the moment, however I feel is important to raise the question with you before its published.

Telling people what to do can be seen as impolite, but guiding the user to complete an action that you’d like them to complete is something quite different, specially if you conduct it nicely, you’re just leading them to complete an action you’d like them to complete, that’s all.

So, do you tell your buyers what to do?

That’s a serious question and ports not only from eCommerce, but into almost every application of the Internet. It could be asking for the sale, a newsletter sign up, a like or a subscribe, it doesn’t matter, you’re helping lead the visitor to complete an action that you’d like them to complete.

There are parts to this site that I’m working on to make the process of asking the user (that’s you) to complete and also tracking this with tools to track conversion. This will be in an another article in the next few days as I had some fun in setting this up and I’m looking forward to sharing some of the results with you.

However for now, I’d like for you to watch a video and count the number of times that you are asked to perform an action. Ignore the content of the video, its 2 minutes long, just press play on the video below:

Summary

Did at any time did I appear rude or impolite?

Did I ask for anything unreasonable?

Think about that for a while, what could you ask (AKA “tell”) your customers to do which would be so easy it wouldn’t take them a few moments to complete?

I would like you to complete an action for me.

In the comments box below, how many actions did I ask you in the video above? (Browny points to anyone whom spots the other 3!)